Instapaper vs. Read It Later: The power of pretty

I'm a big fan of Marco Arment's Instapaper, a multi-platform tool for saving Web content and reading it later in a stripped-down, eye-friendly format. (The iPhone and iPad versions are among the two or three apps I advise people to buy on the day they fire up those devices for the first time.) A couple of years ago, just for kicks, I tried a competing tool, Nate Weiner's Read It Later. I didn't care for it, and returned happily to Instapaper and never looked back. Until a week or so ago, when I gave RIL a second shot. It had been substantially overhauled in the meantime, and in the days since I've found myself looking at Instapaper less and less. And I've been thinking about the role eye candy can play in focusing our ever-shortening attention on textual content.

The big change to RIL since I first tried it has been the addition of the Digest, an alternate view into a user's reading list. Here's what the top of my Instapaper list looks like via the service's Web interface:

And here's what the top of my RIL Digest looks like:

The difference is fairly stark. Instapaper is brisk, clean and functional. It does the job, does it minimally and does it well. RIL Digest offers a more ambitious approach to saved content. It uses a text parser to save stories into predefined categories and presents them in a magazine-like format. (Users can also define their own categories.) Weiner describes the new parser as "insane." And yes, it's fairly insane. It does a really good job of preserving chunks of meta-information like author attribution. But it only does a pretty good job of guessing what category an article should be filed under. Among other bad guesses, it slotted a GQ article about the guys who search for long-lost MIAs under "Design," which is really, really wrong, and required me to go in and manually re-categorize the story. This sort of glitch is fairly common in the Digest view. I'd estimate that in my case about 30% of articles are misfiled when I grab them.

So why have I found myself drifting toward RIL, and feeling like I'm cheating on Instapaper? Because I'm shallow. I like the visual zazz of the RIL presentation, and am willing to put up with some less-than-perfect functionality, and even with the modest incremental work of re-categorizing misfiled articles, because RIL is so pretty. Over the last year or so I've found myself assiduously saving articles to Instapaper, sometimes via the excellent site longform.org, but rarely going back to Instapaper to read them. Over the last couple of weeks on RIL, I've been reading like a madman. In part that's the novelty of having a new tool to play with. But in part it's something else: The allure of a service that draws me into its textual content with a crisp visual flair.

The magazine metaphor is fashionable right now, even as magazines themselves are struggling. Buzzy apps like Flipboard and TweetMag (just out of beta) take content from social-media feeds and display it for consumption in very magazine-like ways. This is surely proof that there's a thirst for new and visually alluring paths to the consumption of content that is often, in its original online form, not much to look at. I'm happy to support both Instapaper and Read It Later, which represent the hard work of talented developers who have slightly diverging views on what their services ought to be, do and look like. But these days I'm leaning toward the newer, flashier RIL, even though in some ways it demonstrably works less well. It makes my beloved Instapaper look and feel a little stodgy.

Instapaper is free, with a $4.99 paid edition that adds features; RIL is priced the same, with the Digest view as a $4.99 add-on. Both are well worth it. longform.org supports both tools.